(a) I’m home, safe and sound. And I ran into Eric Norlin at the baggage claim; he and his wife and friend (brother?) caught the same flight as I. Eric’s running in the Marathon here tomorrow morning.
(b) Margaret, Pippa, and Josiah are doing wonderfully, though Margaret’s stuck on the medication regime that’s wearing the dickens out of her, and has a cold to boot.
(c) The meeting on Outreach and Evangelism to which Margaret took me direct from O’Hare went just fine.
(d) Everyone else seems to have gotten away from DIDW safely.
(e) Response from the outside world seems to confirm the point that Doc and I were trying to make from on-site: digitial identity has dimensions that extend far beyond technical complications, security, and interoperability. DigID won’t go anywhere unless people want what DigID brings them.
The BigCo.s at DIDW heard from fairly gentle voices in Denver. If you want to hear intense, highly-literate resistance, ask Tom. If you want to gauge the potential resistance to any large-scale DigID implementation, check out the Slashdot thread. (Peevish complaint: “Several people from the weblog community are in attendance and have reports available: Denise Howell, David Weinberger, Doc Searls.” Ahem.) The Slashdotters weigh in firmly against the kinds of DigID approaches that the BigCo.s were promoting—and Slashdotters have the savvy to know how to crack what they want to resist (collectively, if not individually). Again, it confirms Doc’s point that DigID will have to come to us as something we want, not something a megacorp thinks is good for us.
Again, I’m not faulting the DIDW organizers, who explicitly indicated to me their hope that next year they can weave a stronger user’s-side perspective into the conference. They tried to do that this year, and will try even harder next year, and I absolutely want to encourage them, not trash them. [Edit: Bryan Field-Elliott makes some of the same points in his post-conference blog.]
Now, I owe some correspondents a few more words about secrecy. Justin, if you take me off the DIDW aggregator, you probably won't miss anything essential.
Posted by AKMA at October 12, 2002 10:38 PM | TrackBack